Indonesia Tops List of Nefarious Internet Traffic Sources

Indonesia surged past China this summer to become the top source of an export that few countries are keen to peddle: Internet attacks.

The volume of so-called “attack traffic” coming from Indonesia soared in the second quarter, according to the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies, which runs a global network of machines equipped to monitor the unwanted transmissions. Its measurements of traffic passing through its own services showed 38% of dangerous traffic came from Indonesian addresses, up from 21% three months earlier. The surge pushed the archipelago past China, which accounted for about a third of attack traffic during both periods.

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Researchers warn that such attacks–which run the gamut from scattershot blasts of server requests to targeted probes–are hard to quantify because many attackers hide behind infected computers in other countries. A network of infected computers, or botnet, directed from Eastern Europe, for instance, can commandeer a horde of Indonesian computers to attack targets elsewhere.

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“It’s not necessary that the attackers themselves are sitting in Indonesia,” Akamai analytics director David Belson said. “There’s obviously a set of systems that have been compromised.”

Mr. Belson pointed to several potential culprits, including pirated Windows software that leaves computers vulnerable to infection. The Business Software Alliance, a Washington industry organization that represents the likes of Microsoft, found 86% of Indonesian PC software installations in 2011 came from pirated copies.

Indonesia can also thank faster networks for some of the undesirable side effects apparently affecting its domestic Internet. The average user there still had to contend with a relatively sluggish 1.7 Megabits per second—excluding mobile networks—but that was more than double the average speed last year.

A spokesman for Indonesia’s ministry of communication and information technology said it hasn’t seen the report from Akamai and will seek clarification from the company. But it “serves as a reminder for Indonesians to use the Internet wisely,” he said.

Indonesia and China might be the biggest source of unwanted requests, but Akamai’s report showed plenty of bad actors in the United States. Malicious traffic from U.S. addresses made up nearly 7% of all attacks in the second quarter, putting it in the No. 3 spot.

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